Re: redhat 80

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 11:14:53AM +0300, Mark Tinka wrote:
> You might want to check the integrity of your CD-ROMs. Since you are pretty
> much getting the somewhat similar errors on 2 different machines, I can't
> suspect hard disk failure, although you may just want to confirm.

A good thing to do: before burning the ISO image you have downloaded, take
an md5 checksum:

   # md5sum  filename.iso    (Linux)
or # md5     filename.iso    (FreeBSD)

and compare it with the official checksum:

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/8.0/en/iso/i386/MD5SUM

If they are the same, you can be completely sure that you downloaded it
correctly.

> But that depends on what you want to use the machine for. If you want to
> install alot of binaries and source, then you may need more space on /usr,
> but if you want to handle alot more mail and logs, then a larger /var is a
> good idea. Or if you will have several users on your machine each with
> access, a bigger / or a separate /home would be a good idea. Note that I
> indicated / as 990MB as an example, because certain boot loaders, such as
> LILO, may not be able to read into the MBR of the first partition of the
> first disk if the size is beyond 1024MB. In such a case, having a separate
> /boot partition would be necessary.

More precisely: many BIOSes cannot read beyond cylinder 1024. That's not the
same as 1024MB, although that's almost always a conservative safe value.

Exactly how big your root partition can be depends on the fake geometry
which the hard drive reports. In most cases it gives the maximal values:
    63 sectors per track
   256 heads (= tracks per cylinder)

1024 cylinders = 1024 * 256 * 63 * 0.5    (each sector is half a KB)
               = 8257536 KB
               = 7.875 GB

So the total of all partitions up to and including the partition which
contains /boot (usually the root partition) must be smaller than that, if
you want it to be bootable.

Once booted, Linux configures the IDE controllers sensibly, and these limits
go away. As the famous quote goes, "we don't need no steenking BIOS" :-)

Cheers,

Brian.

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